Israeli MP: EU action shows Israel is becoming ‘pariah’

An MP from Israel's second largest party has warned that settlement-building risks cutting off Israel from the West.

Ofer Shelah, a Knesset deputy from the centrist Yesh Atid party, a key member of Israel's ruling coalition, whose leader, Yair Lapid, is the country's new finance minister, made the statement in Hebrew on his Facebook page on Wednesday (14 August).

Referring to new EU guidelines which block funding for Israeli entities which operate on Palestinian land, he said: 'The price of occupation that … used to be some abstract, philosophical notion, nowadays is concrete, obvious - and unbearable.'

He noted that settlement-building 'will make us the pariahs of the world.'

He added: 'The Western world that is our frame of reference, the world with whom our relations nourish our technological and economic power, says to us in word and deed that we will no longer be able to belong to it while continuing our control over another people.'

Referring to Israel's potential exclusion from Horizon 2020, the EU's multi-billion-euro research programme, he also said: 'We know where to get money. But it means that we shall also be disconnected from the most important projects, those that are irreplaceable: All the money in the world will not give us a particle-accelerator the likes of the Swiss, where we shall no longer share the research it bears.'